1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to enterprise applications and more specifically to facilitating deployment of customizations of enterprise applications.
2. Related Art
Enterprise applications refer to a class of applications tailored for specific business contexts (banking, finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), typically executed on multiple servers for reasons such as scalability, redundancy and performance, as is well known in the relevant arts.
Customer relationship management (CRM) applications are a class of enterprise applications which simplify an enterprise's interaction with customers in the corresponding context. CRM applications are used in environments such as call centers, where there is a substantial amount of interaction between customers and the call center employees typically to address various issues/concerns raised by the customers.
Enterprise applications also often need to be customized, primarily to adapt (as opposed to fixing of bugs/errors in the software code of) a vendor-provided enterprise application to the specific requirements and needs of the particular enterprise. The software code forming the enterprise application is typically deployed in a state suitable for execution, and further adaptations are made after such deployment. These adaptations are referred to as customizations.
As an example, different enterprises may desire to display their respective images/logos (or messages) on the corresponding user interfaces provided by the same enterprise application executing in their respective environments. However, customizations may be more complex, and often include, for example, additional data, modules (software code providing specific features), and rules/workflows/validations (e.g., in the form of scripts), which control the sequence/timing in which the base modules (contained in the installed enterprise application) are executed for a desired process flow, etc.
In the case of CRM applications noted above, a vendor may install the CRM application software with a basic set of features, and customizations may need to be developed, tested and deployed to meet the enterprise specific requirements.
It is generally desirable that the deployment of customizations be facilitated while meeting one or more of objectives such as simplicity, efficiency, recovery, and speed.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.